Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

March 29, 1998

Geraniums

Life is burning
in everything, in red flowers
abandoned in an empty house,
the leaves nearly gone,
curtains and tenants gone,
but the flowers red and fiery
are there and singing,
let us out.
Even dying they have fire.
Imprisoned, they open,
so like our own lives blooming,
exploding, wanting out,
wanting love,
water,
wanting.
And you, with your weapons and badges
and your fear about what neighbors think
and working overtime
as if the boss will reward you,
you can’t bloom that way
so open the door,
break the glass. There’s fire
in those flowers. Set off the alarm.
What’s a simple crime of property
when life, breath, and all
is at stake?
--Linda Hogan

This story I’m about to tell you is really not an easy one to tell—it concerns an experience I wish had never happened. But like any experience, you learn from it. It takes place in a city far away, a city back East, where I had been asked to speak. Once there, I was put up in the home of a wealthy doctor, a cardiac surgeon, someone who was a prominent member of the community. The house was a restored older home in a neighborhood full of other elegant restored homes that had been gated off from the surrounding areas, for in these surrounding areas lived the poor, mainly poor Black people.

The house was sophisticated, furnished in exquisite taste, and with fine art and antiques. The shades, the linens, the cook ware—all were the very best. In short, the house dripped money. This doctor’s wife was away on a trip, so the house was empty except for the doctor and me. He invited me that first evening to put my feet up and have a drink with him. He talked and talked and talked. And I listened. He told me about his practice and how he wanted things just so and how the hospital failed him. He told me about the poverty of his growing up days. He told me matter-of-factly how he euthanized his father when the father was near death and his pain was too great. He told me about the affair he had that nearly destroyed his marriage. It was over now. He didn’t really love his wife, he said--she didn’t understand him, didn’t appreciate him--but still, he assured me, he had a good sex life with her.

And then he told me about the numbness. "I don’t feel anything," he said. "I just can’t. Never have been able to." I listened, with a growing sense of disquiet. I understood, I told him, that being a surgeon must require a certain amount of repression of feeling, I mean, cutting into people and all that. That I could see. But I grew increasingly uncomfortable. Clearly, he wanted absolute control of his world, and his world had not given him that. What did he want from me, I wondered? Late that night after I had retired to my room and dressed for bed, he came to my door, in his pajamas, wanting to know if he could help me set the alarm clock. I allowed that, no, I could set the alarm all by myself. "Just trying to be helpful," he said. "Right," I answered.

Now this man is a particular individual, with his own particular experiences, and his own particular choices about what, to him, is the "good life." But I wonder how much of what he has become is related to cultural context—that is, how are the values of the larger culture made manifest in this one man? I’m particularly interested in the characteristic numbness. More than once he said, "I just can’t feel anything." What causes people to stop feeling, and what is the cost of that shut-down to the individual and to society?

I don’t believe he is unusual in his difficulty with feelings. I believe many Americans share this shutting down of emotion. I have noticed the difference when I visit other countries, or when I interact with immigrants. There is an aliveness, so often, and a vitality that is missing from most Americans. Speech in foreign lands is somehow more connected to the body than ours, more connected to feeling and spirit. I think many Americans repress our feelings, and when we do so, then we have only two ways to go: inward with depression or outward with the projection of anger onto whatever objects or people appear near at hand.

This doctor said he grew up with very little. I don’t know the details of that upbringing, but I do know that when parents are stressed because of poverty, they often find it difficult to parent well. They may blame themselves for their inability to feed and clothe their children. One or both parents may drink. They may not be able to convey a sense that life is good, because for them it is not good—it is hard and unrewarding. They may find it hard to love themselves and to nurture their children. We have to remember—in spite of the glowing economic picture that is given out by our government—we have to remember that 20 percent, one out of every five of our children, live in poverty in this country. Many of these kids go to school hungry each day. They cannot study, they cannot perform well. These at-risk kids are at risk emotionally as well as physically. They may stop feeling in order to survive. Feeling simply makes them too vulnerable. They may become depressed and compliant—or tough and in-your-face angry.

Of course you don’t have to be poor to feel alienated. We find within all classes children who do not get the emotional nurturing, the protection they need. Given the social and economic environment, providing for children is no easy task. Most often both parents find they must work outside the home to keep the family afloat. It’s harder than ever to provide day-to-day control over children’s activities. Single parents are particularly stressed and often lonely. Neil Postman, professor of communications at New York University, thinks that many children are robbed of their childhood by being exposed too early to the realities of adulthood: death, illness, violence, sexuality. In the past, he says, children learned these concepts in stages so they could assimilate them. "Now, because of the nature of the electronic media, children have full access to the venality, incompetence, errors and corruption of adults," Postman says. How do parents explain the current sexual allegations against President Clinton? It’s a shame that we have to. Our children need a chance to be children. When children are not protected from emotional realities they are not ready to take on, they feel that the world is an unsafe place. And sometimes they shut down emotionally. It’s just too much to take on.

We don’t know much as yet about the backgrounds of the two children, one age 11 and the other 13, who donned camouflage and gunned down their school mates, killing four little girls and a teacher in Jonesboro, Arkansas. But one picture published in the Oregonian spoke volumes to me. It was a picture of Andrew Golden, the eleven-year-old, taken when he could have been no older than 4 or 5. In a baseball cap that seemed too big for his little-boy head, he was squinting his eyes and taking aim with a handgun, a gun that was grossly unsuited to his little-boy hands, a gun longer by far than his forearm. What is a four-year-old doing with a hand gun? Kids are not born this way. They learn from adults what it is to become an adult. The rituals, the values, the trials. How to cope. These little boys—and let’s not forget that they are children—learned somewhere that if you disagree with someone or if you have been hurt by someone, then violence is the solution. Where did they learn this? From television and the movies? From the militia movement? From broader social policies which condone killing as an answer, such as capital punishment? From our nation’s clear willingness to bomb Iraqi citizens to enforce a weapons inspection rule? And it was little girls that these little boys killed. Where did they learn that women need to do what men want them to do, women need to be controlled, to be shown who’s boss? I think it is telling that the shots silenced these little girls, for it is the feminine represents feeling, desire, passion. Killing the feminine is a way of shutting all that out.

It takes mature, healthy adults to raise children well. And what we have now is several generations of parents who themselves have not been parented. Children who grow up feeling shame, blaming themselves--as children will do--for the pain of their parents, not knowing how to love because they themselves have never been respected and valued, these children grow up to be adults who are needy, who are still looking for the childhood they never had, who become addicted to work or food or drugs or sex, and who have shut down their emotional lives because they cannot bear the burdens of adulthood. They are out of touch with their own truest, deepest desires, because hope has long ceased to be a possibility. Like the doctor I spoke of earlier, they may accumulate goods, they may even become prominent, whatever that means, but they cannot do what is the very essence of being human: they cannot love. They cannot give of themselves, because there is no self available. This is the greatest human tragedy of our day.

Love is hot, love sizzles—but "cool" is the cultural ideal. Just the other day I was in a pub having a sandwich with a friend, and our waiter, who had longish hair and round steel-rimmed glasses, a beautiful young man, kept saying "cool" to everything we said. "I want a cheeseburger," I said. "Cool," he answered. "Is everything all right?" he asked later. "Yes, fine," I said. "Cool," he said. "Here’s your check," he said, finally. I felt like saying, "Cool, man, yeah I dig it." Why "cool"? It’s a word that reminds me of film noir—you know, Humphrey Bogart, the hero who just can’t be bothered. Just unruffled by anything. Just detached, man. Cool.

I think it’s an apt word for the kind of culture we have created. Let me play that out for a moment. Let’s start with the basics—the body. Plato, St. Paul, St. Augustine: certainly some of the seminal thinkers of the Western world have insisted that the world of flesh is separate from the world of spirit, have insisted that the yearnings of the body are suspect at best and evil at worst. Now the Europeans read this same stuff, but they seem to throw it off more easily. Maybe it’s the Calvinist influence that did us in, but anxiety about the flesh abounds here in our country as in no other place.

This fear of the flesh is good for the marketplace, good for corporate America, where human bodies are often seen as machines, part of the larger corporate machine. We say, "Let’s plug him in here," or "Let’s get some feedback on that idea." Machine metaphors. Too often the message is "don’t desire, don’t feel." Those emotions would certainly interfere with business as usual. Then when the company needs to "restructure" to be competitive, workers are "downsized." If you are a temp worker, you are even more disposable.

In a book about successful, stable, upper-middle-class men, Robert Weiss has this to say: "All the men report stress and irritability, and half have trouble sleeping . . . . To cope with daily tension, they engage in ‘compartmentalization,’ a process by which problems, anxiety and pain are tucked away in the further recesses of the psyche, to be retrieved when necessary, without cluttering up everyday life. They have few close friends, since emotional closeness threatens compartmentalization (several rarely confide in their wives), and over half of the men have had an affair." It appears that there is a price to be paid for being so "well-adjusted."

And then much could be said about how women’s bodies are seen. A cursory glance at advertisements, magazine articles, movies gives evidence that women’s bodies are still largely portrayed as objects of desire. Why is it that many little girls start losing their academic edge upon reaching adolescence? Do they come to understand that to use their bodies in the world, to lead and to create, that they must give up what is seen as their feminine nature? Must give up, then, love? As I see it, then, the bodies of both men and women are made into objects for the use of others. The erotic, creative force, the elan vitale, is diminished. Sex is separated from intimacy, and the spirit deadens.

Most of the new jobs being created today are service, jobs where people are paid to cater to the customer, jobs like customer service rep or airline attendant. These folks are called upon to do emotional labor, says sociologist Arlie Hochschild. She observes that an increasing number of jobs require a set of rules for feelings, and these jobs make authenticity hard to come by. This is the "social production of alienation," she says, and when people go numb, there’s a whole industry to de-alienate us. "Don’t misunderstand me," she says, "I’m all for therapy. I just want to live in a society that doesn’t take my feelings away from me and doesn’t require a whole industry to help me get them back."

I have spoken already of mass communication, quoting Neil Postman, and now I’d like to say more about that influence on our "numbing out." I think we are over-stimulated by too much of everything coming over the waves. Too many images in too short a time, sound bites that force us to move on before we’ve had any time to reflect. Why are so many kids now being labeled hyperactive and taking drugs so they can sit still in school? Could it have anything to do with the amount of television that they see? And all of us are exposed to so much brutality, so many disasters, so much violence that we develop an emotional condition that now has a name: compassion fatigue. How much can your system take before it just shuts down and in self-protection says, "No more."

In thinking about why we go numb so much of the time, I want to share with you my thinking about what is perhaps the most pervasive cause of our dispiritedness. I believe that, culturally speaking, we are living in sin. I know of course that the morality of nations cannot be the same as the morality of individuals, as theologian Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out years ago in his book Moral Man and Immoral Society. But nations are made up of people, and nations therefore cannot be immoral or amoral and expect that their people will not be disheartened. We are told that we are a democracy and so we feel at least to some extent responsible for the acts of our national government. And the fact is that so much of our past, both distant and near, is painful to hear about.

As a young woman, I moved to Liverpool, England, for two years. I was so innocent. I thought Americans were the saving grace of the world, the greatest country on earth. I can remember still today my shock when a fiery woman from Central America shouted at me, raging about our foreign policy. I didn’t know then how we supported ruthless dictators. That the CIA trained killers to assassinate democratically elected officials. I found that many of the international community saw us as hypocritical, as the "ugly American." They still do. When we read about how we took this land from Native Americans, shunting them onto barren reservations, when we understand how firmly we held onto to slavery and then onto Jim Crow, we have to know that we cannot escape that history by simply saying, "That was back then. This is now. I’m not responsible." Yes and no. The results of this history are with us still, and so long as we are silent about the sins of the past, so long as there is no true repentance, we will suffer spiritually and emotionally. Clinton is down in Africa now, apologizing for slavery. Well, yes. But his "conversation on race" which he wants to happen in this country will never happen until he starts talking about the economic policies which leave so many without hope.

Let me tell you something. It is not good enough for us to be kind to our children and to our friends and to our church members. It will kill us spiritually and emotionally to accept our privilege and simply write off those who can’t seem to make the grade. When we do this, we are living in sin, because sin is separation—separation from God and separation from one another. Somewhere deep down inside we know that all people--from all social classes, from all racial and ethnic groups, from all levels of intelligence and ability—all these are our brothers and sisters, and they have a place in this society. We push them out of our thoughts and out of our lives at our great peril. Our spiritual and emotional peril.

The way out of all this? The way back to feeling and vitality of living? I think we have to ‘fess up. Nelson Mandela told Clinton what to do. Did you read about that? We have to look squarely at systemic sin, past and present, and own up to it. And then change our ways. We do have power. We have to resist at every level. Starting with the TV in the home. Evaluating our work lives and the compromises our work asks of us. Ceasing our endless justifications as to why the poor are poor and people of color don’t do well. Asking what justice requires of us. And acting on the answer.

Then our children will have adults to look up to, values they can adopt, hope for a future. Then we can rise from our doldrums, our "lives of quiet desperation," and feel our hearts quickening. Then we can dance and drum and raise our voices in song. We can be the joyful people we were meant to be.

So be it. Amen.